This course will explore current challenges and opportunities facing firms in the area of environmental sustainability. It will begin with an introduction to sustainability, with a particular focus on how environmental sustainability is relevant to business. Topics such as unsustainable consumption/consumer behavior, market research sustainable product design, sustainable value chains and communications will be covered. The bottom-up approach in terms of immersion, emersion, and design as applied to sustainable business enterprise will be covered. The course concludes with a summary of insights on global challenges in business, with particular focus on poverty and the environment, and on the unique approach employed here in terms of bottom-up immersion, emersion, design, innovation, and enterprise.
Upon successful completion of this course you will be able to:
• Understand the importance of sustainability for business
• Learn about specific topics consumer behavior, market research, product design, value chains and communications using the sustainability lens in business
• Design solutions and develop enterprise plans for sustainable business initiatives
• Apply the bottom-up approach for sustainable business initiatives in any context
This course is part of the iMBA offered by the University of Illinois, a flexible, fully-accredited online MBA at an incredibly competitive price. For more information, please see the Resource page in this course and onlinemba.illinois.edu.

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From the lesson

Module 4: BOTTOM-UP ENTERPRISE

This module summarizes the course on sustainable business enterprises focusing on business, environmental, and social sustainability. It then covers a bottom-up perspective on emerging markets. It also summarizes the two courses on sustainable global business horizons focusing on global challenges in business, with particular focus on poverty and the environment. Finally, the module covers the unique approach employed here in terms of bottom-up immersion, design, innovation, and enterprise. A parallel project stream compares and contrasts the enterprise plans in the two courses and the learning from focusing on subsistence marketplaces for the purposes of upward innovation, i.e., how innovation for subsistence marketplaces influences innovation from subsistence marketplaces.

Taught By

Madhu Viswanathan

Diane and Steven N. Miller Professor in Business

Transcript

So, let me start with charting a bottom-up journey. A number of things are important in trying to chart a course in this bottom-up journey. And we can relate them to passion, purpose, and proficiency. Passion is about what we love to do. Purpose is about what we think we should be doing. And proficiency is about what we're good at doing. So, in our case, really, if you look at the larger purpose at the broadest level, it's about giving people who've not had a chance, a chance. Now, what do I mean by that? Now, that is very broad and very lofty. But I really like to frame things that way, so that it motivates me and keeps me honest. In terms of people who've not had the chance. I'm talking about junior scholars and researchers and practitioners who've not had a chance to learn from subsistence marketplaces. These are different and difficult contexts to get to, and this is a way to enable them to learn and use that learning in their day-to-day work. By people who've not had a chance I mean our students both, right here on campus and across the world. They have not had a chance to understand these very different contexts. And finally, by people have not had a chance, I mean people living in subsistence through our education program on marketplace literacy. We've been on a long journey, which is now almost two decades. And we've learnt a lot, we've failed a lot. We've had much more failure than success, but that's part of the journey as well. What we've done is that we have created research or new knowledge about subsistence marketplaces. We have created education for our students about subsistence marketplaces, and we've created education for subsistence marketplaces. We work in eight countries and we have teams in these countries, and they are very central to what we do. We have taken a very extreme route to trying to understand what is bottom-up. So, literally, almost everything we do has been bottom-up. Some of it may sound very idealistic and that is fine. But part of what we've tried to do is go to an extreme context and build something very bottom-up, so that there are lessons there for others as well. This does not mean that you have to work in a subsistence context, it does not mean that you have to embrace or adopt everything that we do. But there are lessons learned here that can be applied anywhere. So, just as an example, there is a chapter in the book where I talk about how I use these learning in terms of what one of our own programs at the College of Business. So, let's talk a little bit about charting a bottom-up journey. As I said earlier, it starts with passion, purpose, and proficiency. And so, it's very important to find the intersection of these three things. For example, it's very important to find the intersection between purpose and passion, so what you love to do has to intersect to what you think you should do. Similarly, in terms of proficiency, we are good at research, we believe we are good at education. And so that's our proficiency. So, how do we find the intersection of that proficiency and wanting to help people empower themselves in subsistence context? And that is where this whole idea of marketplace literacy came about. Similarly, we use the intersection of our passion and our proficiency to create bottom-up educational experiences for our students. So, this is how we go about in terms of specific examples of finding the intersection of passion, purpose, and proficiency. Part of defining purpose is about understanding that we play in infinite-sum games and in zero-sum games. And first of all, I want to point out I don't mean this as a game in a trivial sense. I mean it in a serious sense. These are serious issues that we try to address, and it is very important not to do harm. Even if we don't do any good, it's very important not to do harm. So, part of this is to realize that we are in this game where it is not zero-sum but it's infinite. We are not competing with others in a zero-sum game where if somebody else wins, we lose. In fact, our purpose is very broad. And in many ways, this is a little bit like competing with ourselves as an individual or at the personal level as well. It's about what we can do or what new part we can go on and so on. So, that's something to keep in mind as well. So, in an infinite-sum game, there are so many different directions that we can take. In an infinite-sum game, there is no clear competition. It's not like there is another offering that is similar to ours and so on. And even if there were, there are so many people whose needs have not been addressed and it really doesn't matter that much. So, these are some things to think about when charting a bottom-up journey in terms of defining purpose, in terms of an infinite- sum game rather than a zero-sum game. Another aspect is to inspire true purpose. The larger purpose that I mentioned earlier is very important. It provides specific pathways. It guides us at the broadest level in terms of why we do what we do. Larger purpose is also a great motivator. It's our campus, so we can always come back to it. Just to give you an example, I often think that if I can do well by my own team members, then what am I going to do in terms of trying to do good for anybody else? If I can make sure that the women who work in our organization feel empowered, then what are we doing in terms of women's empowerment elsewhere? So, this is part of purpose, and I find that it's a very important motivator. It attracts people with similar motivation who are drawn to this idea that they are working for something bigger than themselves. And that is very important as well. In terms of charting a bottom-up journey, it's also important to determine purpose. So I like to think of us as being junctions with roads leading out in every direction. As I mentioned before, this is an uncertain terrain. So, even though I'm talking about roads and junctions, we are really talking about a bit of a jungle where we don't know where the road leads. So, we have the ability to make choices. We have the ability to go down a few roads, see if it is at the intersection of our passion, our purpose, and our proficiency, and then come back to the junction and then try things out again. And this is a great way of learning as well. Now, we have the ability to make choices and, again, I want to repeat that because we are working with people who do not have that ability. Through our education, through where we are in life, we do have the power. We have the power to help empower people. And so it's very important to understand that even being at a junction and being able to take different roads is really a luxury for a lot of people. So, this is what we try to do. So, in terms of our own journey, we started off by looking at low literate, low income consumers in the US. So, part of the motivation there was that this was not looked at, particularly in business research and so on, even though much of society has difficulty with basic reading and counting and other kinds of abilities. Now, as we looked at this work in India, it grew and broadened into what we ended up calling subsistence marketplaces. Looking at consumers, looking at entrepreneurs, and looking at the entire marketplace. So, that was one arena, and we were doing quite a bit of research in this arena. But our motivation to get into this work was ourselves, so that we could try to make a difference, and I say that with all humility. Sometimes I feel it's very arrogant to think that I will be able to make a difference. But that was why I started this work as well. The idea there was not a specific output. The idea there was that we look at people who are vulnerable in terms of the problems they face in the marketplace, and see if we can find solutions that help them. So, that was part of my guiding purpose. The research, of course, expanded. It was bottom-up and very soon we were looking at a variety of issues from consumers, to entrepreneurs, to product development, to business models, to sustainability, and so on. But in parallel, because of this purpose to try to help people, we also started looking at marketplace literacy as termed it. And I started this nonprofit called the Marketplace Literacy Project. Again, I was looking for something unique in what we could do. I was not trying to do something that everybody else is doing. And that's important to keep in mind. It's also important to understand oneself. In my case, I'm very particular about a couple of things, very particular that there is a unique stamp to what I do, which is at the intersection of my passion, my proficiency, and my purpose. And I'm also very particular that I keep the promises that I make. These are the things that keep me awake as well, so I'm just giving you a sense of my own motivation. So, in terms of the Marketplace Literacy Project, what we were focusing on at that time, which then turned out to be quite the right thing to do in my view, was not to focus on "what" people buy or sell but "how", and more importantly, "why". We were finding in our research that people had difficulties with the abstractions because of their low education and low income. So in a way, the education program was trying to overcome this. And we felt that it was very important for people in that situation to have a deeper understanding of the marketplace and "know why", rather than just a "know what" or a "know how". And that's what we focused on through marketplace literacy. So, that was under the arena where we started off, with a face-to-face program which became more of a self-contained, and a teacher-less multimedia program, and then, it slowly expanded to various countries. And finally, we brought this into the classroom through our education experiences. Our anchor program was a year-long class, which involved international immersion, and we are actually in the 11th year of the iteration of this class. But from that came many other courses which reached thousands of students really at the University of Illinois and elsewhere. So, this was our terrain. And in each case, it did not start off as some broad vision where everything was pulled out. It was a broad vision, but a lot of these things that I mentioned took shape because we went down different roads. And we didn't just go down a road because it was a road, we wanted to make sure it fit with where we wanted to go. Because we had to be careful about who we are and who we are not as well. And so, that's how a lot of this developed. And a lot of it is based on the idea of trying. It's based on the idea of doing, trying out without making elaborate promises, so that's similar to taking a few steps down the road and then coming back to the junction, and so on. So that's what I wanted to mention. And the idea there is that, as you go on your journey, at some point you look back and you realize that there wasn't a part there, that you created that part as well. And that is a very satisfying feeling in terms of what we do. And that goes back to this idea of trying to put our own unique stamp on what is being done. Another aspect of charting a bottom-up journey is to circumscribe purpose. And so, the idea here is to address the reality that is, while aiming for the one that should be. Now, there are a number of things that could be done in this arena in terms of circumscribing purpose and dealing with reality. We can certainly have a lot of wishful thinking about "what could be" in terms of employment opportunities, and so on. But we need to balance that with addressing the reality that is in front of us. That is very important as well. Part of being practical as well. What is the reality in front of us? And, how do we try to deal with it? Because that's the reality that leads to the immediate urgencies of the people that we're working with. We can aim for a lot of things, we can hope for a lot of things, but we must also try to help people to deal with the reality that is right in front of them. And so, that's part of what we try to do as well. Also in terms of circumscribing purpose, it's important to identify "what we are not" or "who we are not". I'm going to give you an anecdote but I don't mean to make it out to be something very strategic or any such thing, it's just something that happened. I was standing outside the office in our village, where we booked, in one of the villages where we booked, and there was a woman who had a disability, who saw me and asked me what I'm doing. And I explained what we do and she said yes, she has noticed us in the village. She said her husband has a disability as well, and she wanted help. And I told her that we can help certainly because she can certainly participate in our education program, and so on. To be honest, I felt helpless. But at the same time, as I thought about it later on, I wanted to point out that it's important that we have to be who we are. Certainly there are instances when we help people on an individual basis, but that's not something that we can frankly do as a matter of routine. It ends up to a point where, when we try to do everything we end up doing nothing. So, we have to be careful. And also when we work in a rural setting in a village, it's a little bit like a fish bowl and what we do ends up communicating about who we are. And I'm not saying this in a strategic way because our instincts are always to help right there. But I have, on occasion, told people that really the way I can help is through our organization, where I can aggregate the resources and move forward. And it's a heartbreaking thing to tell somebody who is in need of help. But I want to be honest about that, that you know, these are some of the stories that come back to mind and I don't mean to address it in some strategic way. But I think it's very important to understand that, you know, we also need to understand who we are not. Just to give you a couple more examples. I was in a refugee settlement where there's a wonderful organization that does livelihood training over five or six months. Very, very important, very deep skills. But that's not who we are. We really believe in providing the first layer of the onion in terms of marketplace literacy to get people to understand how the customer is important, the marketplace is important; what value is, how value is give and take in the marketplace, but how values are applicable in all aspects of their lives, and so on. So, we have created a unique space where we teach people these intangibles. And our goal is to create greater self confidence, awareness of rights, and skills in the marketplace. But we implement our program in a short form, through three half-days or two sessions each of three half-days and so on, and in a variety of different formulations. That is different from teaching and in-depth course over many months. So, it's very important for us to know who we are not. Similarly, we are not experts at providing livelihood training or financing. So at best, we can link people to other organizations that do so. But it's important that we understand our limited ability to do things, and then therefore, what our primary purpose are to be. It's also important to execute the domain of purpose. And that to me comes down to finding people and place. To me, people and place make up a home, and a home is very important. Indeed, financial resources are important and so on. But if you ask me what's the most important thing in the arena that I work in, it's finding people and finding a place. And finding people is not about hiring the right people alone, it's about growing up with the people that you hire in terms of trying to figure out this bottom-up journey. So, as I will talk about later, we talk of how people are not replaceable parts, they're part of our intertwined destiny. And so, that's what we try to do, we try to find people who have that same care about the community and that to me is the most important currency. And once we have people, then we know that we have people of like minds who share our purpose, our passion, and who develop the proficiencies. The key there is to share the passion and also the larger purpose. And it's not a static thing, it evolves over time and we evolve along with the people that we work with. The next thing to do is to find a place. So, it may be a small starting point, but it's the areas of a city that you want to work in or the villages or the one village where you want to start. And you want to make sure that you find the place where you can pick your battles and you can essentially have some stability in terms of what you want to do, and there is some shared purpose as well. So, of course, we want to look for places that will allow us to move forward without too many obstacles, and so on. So, to me people and place are the most important things, and that gives us a home. The last part of charting a bottom-up journey is listening and learning. And this is really about bottom-up immersion. I once had a very well-meaning student asked me, how much money he should take to go back, in this particular case, to India because he wanted to help people. And I told him not to take any money. I told him, "Really, let us enable these bottom-up learning experiences for you. Just go in there, listen and learn, and try to figure out where you think you fit. That is so much more important. " And the idea there is that each person has to figure out their journey and where their passion, and their purpose, and their proficiency intersects. And they may decide that the way they want to give back is perhaps through supporting other organizations. That is fine too. Everybody has to find their own balance. But part of this is listening and learning. Part of it for us is bottom-up immersion. That's where it starts. And that's where it started for me as well in terms of really listening and learning from people, and that led to this idea that there is a gap that needs to be addressed. And so, that's what we ended up pursuing. So again, bottom-up immersion is something that you will see us talk about in so many different ways. I'm giving you a lot of different details and exercises, and so on. But part of that is also when you try to figure out what you want to do. It's so important to spend some time listening and learning. It's so important to allow yourself that luxury of a few months or a year, where you are learning from very different settings while proactively trying to figure out where you fit. So, that's part of charting a bottom-up journey as well.

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